D is for Dortmund
Leaving Dakar for Dortmund was slightly scary in more ways than one. Though I had a firm job offer to teach at a German high school, no contract had yet been signed. On the strength of what amounted to little more than a solemn promise, I had bought a plane ticket and put down a month’s rent on a furnished apartment I had located on the internet but not actually seen. I was really quite petrified, but I argued to myself this way: the rainy season was coming to Dakar, so I could deal with the electricity cuts, the sweltering days and the ever-determined mosquitoes or take my chances, head to Europe, visit friends and family and see what happened.
I had not actually been overly eager to come to Dortmund, located in
North Rhine Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state. The region in
general is affectionately, if also somewhat pejoratively, referred to
as the “Ruhrpott,” a reference to the region’s thriving coal mining
industry. The auto industry was also a huge one here, with Opel
headquartered in nearby Bochum, so in my imagination I saw a huge
metropolis characterized by blackened buildings and smokestacks, huge
commercial centers and buildings and very little charm. Thankfully,
that has not turned out to be the case – I live in what is called the
“Kreuzviertel,” right near Dortmund’s TU, or technical university. The
neighborhood is full of pleasant cafes and restaurants, immaculately
clean, tree-lined streets, and quaint buildings so that I am reminded
a bit of the brownstones I used to enjoy so much as I would wander
around Brooklyn Heights after a walk across the Bridge.
A Memorable Weekend
So last Saturday was an exciting day, as I hosted a nine-year old friend from the nearby island of Goree. I was not entirely sure how it would go, as we’d never spent quite so much time together before, plus there is a bit of a language barrier (her native language is Wolof, see ), but I wanted to introduce her to my world since I had been a frequent visitor to hers.
I met her at the ferry depot and she then took her first taxi ride ever (her usual means of transportation is of course the car rapide), so she peered rapturously out the window the entire time. She was fascinated when we came to the school in which I live, too, no doubt imagining herself seated behind one of the little wooden desks or playing in the yard at recess.
We then went to the beach around the corner from me, at the surf school at the Ngor restaurant, where the water can be quite rough. My little friend was cautious, as she does not know how to swim, though we did splash in the waves a bit. When she spied her first ‘chapeau de chinois’ (apparently these are called ‘limpets’ in English and are a type of saltwater snail. I had never heard of them before, but the locals enjoy eating them), she at once became very industrious, prying an inordinate number of them off the rocks and wrapping them solicitously in a tissue.
I cautiously asked her what she intended to do with them. “Take them home and cook them, of course!’ she responded brightly. “Oh,” I said, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to find ways to distract her enough so that she would forget to take them home, but she was astonishingly single-minded about it: she was a girl with a mission.
Once we arrived home, she set the dread things to boil and said that we must have a ‘sauce’ to accompany them, a ‘sauce’ that accompanies a variety of different Senegalese dishes. It consists of chopped raw onion, mustard, vinegar, lime juice, salt, pepper, and Maggi (a sort of consommé cube that is basically pure MSG, used in virtually every dish throughout the country, including the famous tangana sandwiches). Despite what you may think, it was absolutely delicious and the perfect accompaniment to our, um, sea snails. As she was chopping the onions on my counter (which she was just tall enough to reach), she spied a little plastic bag full of ‘pain de singe,’ or monkey bread, and gleefully announced that she would now prepare a local drink called bouye. She added soursop extract, milk and banana to make a truly luscious beverage and beamed shyly when I told her how impressed I was with her mastery in the kitchen – I had been matter-of-factly relegated to the role of spectator, which was perfectly fine by me.
A Day at the Zoo
According to Tamara Vodovoz, a trained veterinarian I know here who volunteers at a local zoo, most African zoos offer animals the worst imaginable conditions. Though the management willingly takes your money, there is hardly any subsequent investment in the zoo; there are neither clear objectives nor a plan to improve the park in order to reach international captive wildlife wellbeing standards.
There are few tools available to conduct any meaningful work. Though
there is a veterinary technician on staff, he has spent far too much
of his time reading the newspaper because there are neither medicines
nor resources for him to carry out de-worming or vaccination for the
animals. Any zoo should have basic equipment such as a blow dart and
anesthesia and a staff that knows how to use them, yet here they do
not. In one disheartening example, five little jackals that were kept
in far too small a cage escaped, but not for long: one of them ended
up with neurological damage because a keeper hit him on the head with
a shovel in order to return him to his cage.
Hail to Obama 009
The way things work here always astonishes me slightly, but I guess this is all part of the charm of being in Senegal. I have been to a lovely fishing village called Toubab Dialaw about three times now (http://www.traveling-stories-
Marieme is a necklace seller stationed just outside one of the more upscale hotels in the area. Her ‘shop’ consists of about a yard or so of fabric spread on the ground. She removes the necklaces from her enormous woven basket, (which is generally perched atop her head on her way to work), arranges them carefully on the cloth, and voila – she is ready for business.
I think it was her baby Babacar that caused us to enter into our first conversation, as he is utterly adorable. Three unneeded necklaces later, we were all fast friends. When I returned to the area last weekend for a visit, bringing copies of the photos I had taken last time for Marieme and her family to keep, I asked where I could eat a really good thiebou dieune, the national rice dish with fish and vegetables (http://www.traveling-stories-
It never occurred to me that I might be invited home, but that was exactly what happened as a result, and around two that afternoon she left her colleagues to attend to her wares while she walked me through her village to her home. Like the majority of local homes, there was a stereo and electricity, but neither a stove nor a fridge. Since the locals often have neither the luxury of gas supplied through a mains pipe, nor the certainty of being able to pay a regular monthly bill, gas must be bought in containable units stored in canisters, and continually replaced when the canister runs out.
Musings
So the time is drawing near where I will have to make a decision: do I stay or do I go? And how come someone who is normally so decisive is in this quandary, anyway? When I first came on board, I made it quite clear to my bosses that I would stay for two years and then leave – after all, besides the fact that I do not have hot water, there is also no 401 K option here, and certainly no extra money to put away for the proverbial rainy day.
I was so culture-shocked when I first arrived. Not only did I hate the daily morning call to prayer at 5:45 a.m. or so and the lack of sidewalks anywhere, but I was paranoid about mosquitoes (I have given up the Mefloquin and sleep without a net), I was paranoid about the vegetables (the worst case of the runs I had was when I tried using bleach to wash my veggies), I was paranoid about the stray animals, I was paranoid about street crime, and in a conversation with my mother I recently established several important things:
Spellbound
Talkin’ Trash
One of the first things to strike any visitor to Dakar will be the amount of garbage everywhere. People throw garbage unapologetically on the ground, in the street, in the sand, in the water; it is everywhere and anywhere. The two major types of ‘waste removal’ systems that exist here seem to be either burning refuse or sending it out to sea. One gorgeous road along the ocean has a ditch leading off of it; the ditch is chock full of old chlorine bottles, dishwashing liquid bottles and assorted other plastics of all kinds. When the tide comes in, it quietly and unostentatiously makes all the trash disappear. As is the case throughout most of the very populous Third World, the locals do not tend to think much about trash, as they have more pressing concerns, but holidaymakers understandably find it unappetizing to repose on a beach full of refuse or do the breast stroke in water that is full of plastic bags or juice cartons.Thankfully, however, there are idealists out there who instead of booking the next flight out to a more pristine kind of place are trying both to sensitize and empower the locals, and with great success. The concept behind the Solid Waste Management Project is deceptively simple: what happens when you first provide people in a community with waste containers, educate them on the advantages of recycling and composting versus the disadvantages of polluting, and then show them how the resulting organic fertilizer can even yield a small profit? It sounds too good to be true, but the phenomenal thing is that the Joal recycling project, which began as a six month pilot project, will soon have spread to six of 27 neighborhoods in the region.
The award-winning NGO Tostan, brainchild of Molly Melching, initially financed the pilot project (this story, too, is worth telling: on a flight between NY and CA, Molly Melching gave up the comfort of business class to sit in economy, hence saving $5,500, the very money that Tostan then used to fund the pilot project. Just goes to show that a little thrift can go a long way!) Tostan has also paid for a feasibility study to be conducted to see if the waste project can be expanded to the areas of Mbour and Thies. Impressed by the success of the project, both the World Wildlife Fund and the US Embassy have committed to help finance further recycling initiatives.
A Nobel Endeavor
If you have never heard of this year’s Nobel Prize winner in literature, J.M.G. Le Clézio, don’t be too hard on yourself, as his body of work (over 40 novels!) was virtually out of print in English until news of the prize hit the headlines. At the age of 23, Le Clézio wrote his first novel, The Interrogation, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Goncourt, and has continued to be honored for his work ever since, with thirteen percent of French readers voting him the greatest living French writer in 1994.I managed to learn all this just before leaving for the bookstore Quatre Vents in nearby Mermoz, where he and a fellow writer with arresting dark curls named Hubert Haddad, winner of a major 2008 prize in Francophone literature for his book called Palestine, had agreed to a question-and-answer session with our students (a session, which, unfortunately, was dominated by pedantic teachers asking tripartite questions – you know, the kind that take longer to ask than to answer. While I am on a rant, let me not forget to mention the teacher who answered her ringing cell phone midway through the event, because all of us in the vicinity of course preferred to have a share in planning her evening than hear these eminent writers talk about their craft..!).
To return to Le Clézio: he was raised bilingually (his father was a Mauritius-born British doctor), spending his childhood in Mauritius and Nigeria and his adolescence in Nice, which may help to explain the omnipresence of sunlight and the sea in his work. As an adult, he traveled extensively, earning a doctorate in early Mexican history and teaching in Korea and Thailand as well as living with the Embera-Wounaan tribe in Panama, so that he may justly be called a citizen of the world.
Tripping Off to Touba
I have never been a religious sort, so it was surprising even to me that I agreed to go to Touba (a word meaning ‘felicity’ in Arabic) and join a religious pilgrimage of the Mouride brotherhood intended to celebrate the exile of Cheikh Amadou Bamba. However, this is an important national and even international event, attended by hundreds of thousands from all over the world, and as I believe in seizing opportunities as they arise, I thought I should share in what promised to be a unique experience.
Participating in the Magal, as it is called, from a Wolof word meaning praise or render homage to, is not for the faint of heart. First, I squeezed myself into a car rapide, the local means of transport distinguished only by its decrepitude, and jolted for about five hours down the ill-kept road towards the sacred city. Having left right after work, I arrived a few hours before daybreak, when it was quite cold and the knick knack vendors were just setting up shop. It was odd during the day to notice pictures of the spiritual leader (known as a marabout, mar-ah-boo) on display right next to sexy underwear and elasticised waist beads, but of course I suppose it would be sinful to let a prime marketing opportunity go to waste (excuse the pun, I could not resist).
Second, since the city is overrun during this period, I then spent the following night on the cold hard floor of a most impressive mosque, sardined in with about 1,000 other pilgrims. I had been warned that, as a woman, I would need to cover my hair with a headscarf, and during the frigid night I was actually grateful for the additional warmth the scarf provided. Lest you thought an eerie silence might have prevailed in the Great Mosque, far from it: religious songs were sung all through the night, but I found it strangely soothing, as some people might enjoy listening to Gregorian chant, if the comparison is not too bizarre, as the styles of music are of course very different. I was at any rate so very tired that there could easily have been a gas explosion next door and I would not have stirred (this in fact happened to me when I was living my student existence in Feldmattenweg in Freiburg – some windows in my building even shattered. Deep in my slumbers, I noticed nothing. But I digress).
The idea of the pilgrimage is to visit the tomb of Cheikh Amadou Bamba, who was widely respected for the steadfastness of his faith and his resistance in the face of the French colonial powers. Dismayed by the influence he wielded over his considerable number of followers, the French colonial authorities decided it would be prudent to send him into exile. During the years of his exile to Gabon, numerous attempts were made to break him both spiritually and physically. As one story tells us, when shackled on a ship, Bamba broke free when the time came to pray. He flung his prayer mat upon the water – where, miraculously, it stayed afloat – and was able to pray upon it, thus fulfilling his religious duty. In another story known by every Senegalese, Bamba’s captors kept him in a cell with a hungry lion. When the men came to retrieve Bamba’s remains, they were astonished to find the lion reposing peacefully at his feet instead. Finally, the French decided to allow him to return to his people, agreeing to give him a piece of land – Touba – that would be dedicated to the practice of his religion.
Jewel of Medina
I like to provoke my students on occasion, to probe their minds and consciences, so I recently gave them an article by Alvaro Vargas Llosa from the International Herald Tribune http://www.iht.com/articles/
Though there is no actual sex in the novel, one passage in particular created a hullabaloo because it describes the deflowering of the Prophet’s youngest wife: “The pain of consummation soon melted away. Muhammad was so gentle. I hardly felt the scorpion’s sting. To be in his arms, skin to skin, was the bliss I had longed for all my life.”
